Eye On A.I. cover art

Eye On A.I.

Eye On A.I.

By: Craig S. Smith
Listen for free

About this listen

Eye on A.I. is a biweekly podcast, hosted by longtime New York Times correspondent Craig S. Smith. In each episode, Craig will talk to people making a difference in artificial intelligence. The podcast aims to put incremental advances into a broader context and consider the global implications of the developing technology. AI is about to change your world, so pay attention.Eye On A.I.
Episodes
  • #334 Abhishek Singh: The $1.2 Billion Plan to Turn India Into an AI Superpower
    Apr 16 2026

    What if the country that trained the world's engineers finally decided to keep them?

    In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Abhishek, the civil servant leading India's $1.2 billion national AI Mission, to explore how one of the world's largest and most diverse nations is mounting a serious challenge to US and Chinese dominance in artificial intelligence.

    Abhishek breaks down the honest story behind India's late start. World-class talent, but no research ecosystem to retain it. Digitization without AI-usable data. Compute so scarce that the entire country had fewer than 500 GPUs just two years ago. And a brain drain so severe that the engineers India trained are now running the biggest tech companies in the world, just not from India.

    Abhishek walks through exactly how the mission is tackling each of those gaps. A subsidized compute program that gives researchers and startups access to 38,000 GPUs at under a dollar per hour. AI Kosh, a national data platform pulling public and private sector datasets into a single AI-ready repository. Centers of Excellence connecting IITs around domain-specific research in agriculture, healthcare, education and mobility. And a sovereign LLM program, with four models already in development and eight more on the way, built specifically for India's languages, voices and needs.

    We also get into the geopolitics. Where India stands as the US and China carve out competing AI spheres of influence. Why Abhishek is pushing for a UN-led governance framework rather than aligning with either bloc. And what it would actually take for a country of 1.4 billion people to not just catch up, but leapfrog.

    Subscribe for more conversations with the people shaping the future of AI and emerging technology.

    Stay Updated:

    Craig Smith on X: https://x.com/craigss

    Eye on A.I. on X: https://x.com/EyeOn_AI

    (00:00) Introduction and Abhishek's Background

    (02:43) What the India AI Mission Is and How It Started

    (04:53) The $1.2 Billion Budget and Total AI Investment in India

    (06:36) Data Center Build-Out and the Road to 7 Gigawatts

    (08:11) AI Kosh: India's National Data Platform

    (10:50) Subsidized GPUs and How Researchers Access Compute

    (12:41) Brain Drain, Reverse Migration and Retaining Top Talent

    (17:24) Centers of Excellence Across IITs and Key Sectors

    (19:21) Expanding Fellowships and Training the Next Generation

    (20:11) Why India Started Late and What Changed

    (21:48) Sovereign LLMs Built for Indian Languages and Needs

    (22:42) The Diversity Challenge and Culturally Relevant AI

    (23:16) Government Funding for Foundation Model Development

    (24:12) The AI Impact Summit and India's Role on the Global Stage

    (24:52) India, China, the US and the Battle for AI Governance

    (29:37) The UN Framework and India's Third Way

    (31:16) India-China Relations and New AI Partnerships

    (32:01) How the $1.2 Billion Budget Was Decided

    (33:31) Can India Actually Catch Up With the US and China

    Show More Show Less
    35 mins
  • #333 Adi Kuruganti: Why Your AI Pilot Is Failing and What It Takes to Reach Production
    Apr 15 2026

    Most enterprises are excited about agentic AI. But very few are actually deploying it in production.

    In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Adi Kuruganti, Chief AI and Development Officer at Automation Anywhere, to break down why agentic AI is so hard to get right in the enterprise and what it actually takes to move from a promising pilot to a mission-critical deployment.

    Adi explains why the future of enterprise automation is not agentic AI alone, but the combination of deterministic and agentic systems working together, and why companies that treat AI as a technology problem instead of a business outcomes problem are setting themselves up to fail.

    They dig into how Automation Anywhere is orchestrating agents across legacy systems, healthcare platforms, and financial services workflows, why governance and compliance are the first questions every enterprise asks, and how their Process Reasoning Engine is continuously improving agent performance using metadata from over 400 million running processes.

    The conversation also covers the real timeline to a fully autonomous enterprise, why the POC to production gap is the biggest failure point in enterprise AI today, and what companies that wait too long risk losing to competitors who started the journey earlier.

    If you want to understand where enterprise AI actually stands today and what it takes to deploy it responsibly at scale, this episode gives you a clear and grounded perspective.

    Subscribe for more conversations with the people building the future of AI and emerging technology.

    Stay Updated:

    Craig Smith on X: https://x.com/craigss

    Eye on A.I. on X: https://x.com/EyeOn_AI

    (00:00) Why Enterprises Are Struggling With Agentic AI

    (02:39) What Automation Anywhere Does and the APA Category Explained

    (08:01) Deterministic vs Agentic AI: Why You Need Both

    (10:59) How Human in the Loop Works in Enterprise AI

    (17:16) The Mozart Orchestrator and Process Reasoning Engine

    (23:50) How AI Is Upgrading and Replacing Classic RPA

    (27:31) How Automation Anywhere Works With Enterprise Customers

    (31:53) The Biggest Challenges of Scaling Agentic AI

    (41:10) The OpenAI Partnership and What It Means

    (47:06) Training Staff and Building AI Literacy at Scale

    (51:39) Staying Close to Customers as the Technology Shifts

    (53:17) Is the Autonomous Enterprise Actually Coming

    Show More Show Less
    58 mins
  • #332 Dan Faulkner: The Code Is Clean. The App Is Broken. Why AI Development Has an Integrity Problem
    Apr 14 2026

    What happens when AI writes code faster than anyone can test it?

    In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Dan Faulkner, CEO of SmartBear, to explore one of the most underappreciated risks of the AI coding boom. As tools like Claude Code and Codex push software development to unprecedented speed, the systems built to validate that software are being left behind. Dan makes a distinction that every engineering leader needs to hear: clean code passing unit tests is not the same as an application that actually works.

    Dan introduces the concept of application integrity, continuous and measurable assurance that your software does everything it was intended to do and nothing it was not. He explains why the gap between what AI builds and what teams actually validate is already creating hidden risk in production, and why that risk compounds the faster you ship.

    We also get into the new failure modes that agentic AI is introducing. Slop squatting, instruction inversion, cascading errors. These are not theoretical. They are happening now, at scale, in codebases that no human has fully read.

    Dan also walks through SmartBear's autonomy ladder framework and their newest product BearQ, a team of AI agents that explores your application, builds a knowledge graph, authors tests, runs them, and updates everything as your app evolves. The key distinction: it is built to augment human teams, not replace them.

    Finally, Dan shares his honest take on the future of software engineering. The fallacy was always that coding was the hard part. The hard part is knowing what to build. That skill is not going anywhere.

    Subscribe for more conversations with the people shaping the future of AI and emerging technology.

    Stay Updated:

    Craig Smith on X: https://x.com/craigss

    Eye on A.I. on X: https://x.com/EyeOn_AI

    (00:00) Introduction and Dan Faulkner's Background

    (01:05) What SmartBear Does: Testing and API Lifecycle Management

    (03:27) AI Is Outpacing Application Testing

    (07:51) Slop Squatting, Instruction Inversion and New AI Failure Modes

    (17:31) Black Boxes, Technical Debt and the Expertise Crisis

    (22:00) How to Avoid Self-Validating AI Systems

    (24:11) The Autonomy Ladder and BearQ

    (31:30) Why Testing Must Be Continuous and Everywhere

    (36:31) Infrastructure Risk and Automation Bias

    (44:11) The Future of QA and New Specialist Roles

    (50:44) How Teams Use SmartBear Tools Today

    (58:57) The Future of Software Engineering and Human Roles

    Show More Show Less
    55 mins
No reviews yet